Saturday, December 22, 2012

It's an excellent although lengthy article. The photographs are stunning! The discoveries being made at Gobekli Tepe are turning the archaeological world upside down. Just think about it -- 11,000 years old, we were ending the last Ice Age and here were these mysterious people that we know nothing to little about, carving these incredible structures out of stone. How did they do it? Why did they do it? Who the hell were they?

Trevor Watkins describes Göbekli Tepe, the mysterious 11,000-year-old site in south-east Turkey that has turned prehistory upside down

Why would people carve something so magnificent inside a deep pit, and then bury it
under tons of soil? The base is decorated with "birds" but to tell you the truth,
they look like dinosaurs to me! Well, they do, damn it! One of a pair of 5.5 metre-tall monoliths in Enclosure D. Below its 'head', around its 'neck', is a band and pendant. Its hands are on its 'stomach', just above a belt with an ornamental buckle and a fox pelt worn as a loincloth. Below is a frieze of birds.

Gobekli Tepe before the start of excavations -- an entirely man-made hill or hills. That's a tree on top.
Rather reminds me of those earthen pyramid-shaped hills in China...Göbekli Tepe before it was excavated. The hill is entirely man-made; the mulberry tree on its summit gives an idea of scale.

Funny how something out of nowhere can just reach out and grab you. Seeing the small stone piece, above, it absolutely fascinates me. Is it a relic of the world's oldest writing??? What the hell is it? What does it mean? I say to myself how could ancient people NOT have had writing? They talked to each other! Why would they not have been able to write to each other too? Is that a snake on the left? I say yes. It appears that snakes are abundantly represented in the imagery at Gobekli Tepe. Where they considered a sacred animal or have ritual significance as they did in other later cultures, or were they depicted so often just because they were abundant in the area, like the carved images of scorpions and other creepy-crawlies? Was the area semi-arid then, as it pretty much appears to be today?

And are there very very faintly etched figures to the left of the serpent, just above and just below mid-stone? Do you see them? The lines do not look like random natural scratches or tiny fissures in the stone, they look deliberately etched. I wish I knew how to use a program to circle them for you, or add little arrows pointing at them in this image! Drat! One of the things on my list to tackle once I am retired!

But, nobody knows what this is - or they're not saying (sounds paranoid, I know, but careers are on the line. Who's going to go out on a limb and say yeah, it's writing! Only to be greeted by a derisive chorus of Oh Yeah, PROVE IT!) Are these markings just the equivalent of carved "doodles?" A small, flat incised stone plaque. Similar examples have been found on contemporary settlement sites in north Syria. Were these signs the pre-cursor of writing?
"A geophysical survey of the whole site shows that there are more great circular enclosures all over the man-made hill. As many as 20 more, some of them larger than those already excavated, can be seen on the ground-penetrating radar scans. Where there are no large circles visible in the scans, there is evidence that the site went on in use for several more centuries after enclosure building ceased. Professor Schmidt has done some preliminary work in the area beside the four big enclosures, and that shows that many small rectangular structures were built in this later phase. Each structure had one or two pairs of monoliths, but they are much smaller and less richly decorated."

What happened during this later phase to change things so much? Was the culture dying out? Had a series of wars, or disease, famine, or drought, occurred to greatly reduce the number of people and the resources available to devote to continued building of these mysterious complexes? We don't know!

"As you leave the site and reflect on the astonishing things you have seen, you begin to wonder how many people were directly involved, and how many more were needed simply to support them. And to ask who designed the enclosures, specified what was to be carved on each stone, and supervised the logistics of the whole complex construction?

"There are two things we can say for certain about the people who created Göbekli Tepe. First, they were not living at or near Göbekli Tepe. There are no known sites in the area around the plateau. But there are contemporary settlements along the River Euphrates in north Syria. They each had a circular subterranean building at the centre of the settlement, similar in form to the enclosures at Göbekli Tepe. These communal buildings were also back-filled at the end of their use-lives, and there are elements of imagery that these sites have in common with Göbekli Tepe. Professsor Schmidt believes that Göbekli Tepe was a sacred 'central place' for the whole region, where people came together to share in the construction of monuments that expressed their common ideology.

"The second remarkable thing we know is that, at the time when the enclosures at Göbekli Tepe were being made, people living in south-west Asia were not yet farmers. It has been generally believed that only those with control of their resources – farmers – could manage the logistics to assemble and support such a large and skilled workforce. The people of the region at that time were not hunter-gatherers; they were not living as small, mobile hunter-gatherer bands; rather, they lived in substantial numbers in permanent settlements. In parts of south-west Asia, people had been harvesting and storing wild wheat, barley, peas, beans and lentils for thousands of years before Göbekli Tepe was built, which enabled them to create stable, permanent village communities, even before they began to domesticate plants and animals."

And check out this object, it is totally awesome:

Three views of a unique 1.5-metre-tall sculpture that was found defaced and buried within a stone wall. The excavators have nicknamed it the 'totem-pole' because it is composed of a series of figures each holding the next figure down. The head of the top figure is more like a bear than a human. It holds the head of a human figure, which in turn holds another figure. On each side there is a snake.
Okay, am I crazy for thinking that the top head is a lioness (Sekhmet?) and the bottom figure is a bull or a cow holding a moon or sun inside it's horns (Hathor?) Catalhoyuk had lots of bull or cow with sun or moon between horns imagery too, albeit about 4,000 or 5,000 years later. Just saying...

Geez, there's just no telling what may happen once I start cleaning the house and getting ready to entertain. I totally missed the end of the world, for instance. I waited for it to come all day while at the office but nope, totally missed it. It must have happened either when I was sleeping or later on last night when I was laying the dining table for lunch today, putzing around with tablecloths and placemats and trying different centerpiece arrangements. Hmmm..... Ancient Mayan joke: What comes after a Baktun? Answer: Another Baktun, bwwwaaahhhaaaaaa! Well, okay, it sounds funnier in my head when I tell it to myself :)

I also totally missed the Solstice. Forgot all about it, in fact. I knew it was coming, because I had commented about it to someone at the office on Thursday that the days that would finally start to get a little longer each day. The worst is over now, except for below zero temperatures that usually happen around here in January and February and, of course, snow storms. Don't know how I'm going to cope with those since I am under orders to not ever do any snow shoveling ever again. So today I shoveled, but only a little, because there was only a little snow in my driveway. And it's frozen hard. The first great blizzard of 2012 in Wisconsin missed Milwaukee but left a lot of rain, sleet, slush and about an inch of wet heavy snow on top of all that froze overnight and Friday morning when I walked down the driveway headed toward the bus to go to the office, it was crunch crunch crunch. I probably should have gotten up at 4 a.m. and shoveled out. Nah.

So this morning the sun was warm even though the temperature was cold. I pulled out my trusty old shovel and headed outdoors, soon working up a sweat. It was mostly useless exercise, I hardly was able to scrape up any of the frozen snow. Oh well. I put down some salt and hope it will be sunny tomorrow and it will melt away.

Lunch today, however, was a great success. I love entertaining. I should do it more often. I enjoy cooking and cleaning to get the house ready for guests doesn't feel quite so boring and burdensome as necessary dusting and vacuuming once a week. Must do that tomorrow. During the Packers game. If they are doing badly and I don't want to hear the announcers (the t.v. announcers suck anyway), I just turn on the vacuum and go to it! If I get curious, I can always take a peek at the t.v. out of the corner of my eye.

Anyway, some 5,000 people showed up for the Solstice at Stonehenge, which according to this BBC article, is about five times as many as the usual crowd. Were they expecting maybe the earth to move beneath their feet and swallow them all up or something? Take a look at this motley group:

I wouldn't these guys as extras for a zombie movie, geez! Does the dude with the cheap imitation pirate hat really think that back scratcher is going to - well -- what, exactly? LOL! Maybe he was hoping to use it to pick up women's skirts surreptitiously, only no chicks showed up wearing skirts. I mean - skirts at Stonehenge in winter? Ha! I'm thinking the stones were all rather relieved once this group dispersed, yeah, the nutters are gone for another year...

While I cannot speak to the appearance of the Magi or their number (three is traditional), the biblical accounts agree that Joseph was much older than the "Virgin" Mary, the mother of the Christ child, whom legend says was about 14 years of age around the time she was miraculously impregnated.
In this depiction, the artist has shown that age differential by depicting Joseph as a grey-haired man with wrinkles (far left), while Mary is young and beautiful. The biblical account of the event did not mention the particular number of Magi who traveled a long distance after following a suddenly appearing very bright "star" in the eastern sky that had been foretold in one or more ancient prophetic accounts as signifying a great event. What we can deduce is that whoever followed this "star" would have been travelling from the east toward the west, following the path of the travelling "star."

It was, evidently, one or more Chaldean scholars who, after beholding the appearance of the untoward super star in the sky [a supernova?], began to research ancient accounts and uncovered the prophecies about the birth of a great Savior who would be born under that particular "sign". By piecing together numerous prophecies, some of which are recorded in the Christian Bible, that were foretold by many different seers over hundreds of years, the seers of the day arrived at a conclusion. Some of them headed toward the light in the sky that marked the general vicinity of the birth of the King of Kings.

The putative King of Israel King Herod's seers had also seen this sign in the sky, and according to one biblical account, after much study it was reported to Herod that a King of Kings would be born in a certain area during a certain window of time. Herod subsequently ordered the execution of all male infants under a certain age (we are not certain what the age limit was, and perhaps the soldiers who were carrying out the orders were not exactly demanding proof of date of birth, either) in this particular area. As far as I am aware, there is no independent verification from third-party sources that this "Slaughter of the Innocents" ever took place.

In any event, the biblical account says that Joseph had been warned in a vivid dream to flee the area some time after the Christ child was born -- we do not know how old the child was at the time. That is why Joseph took Mary and the infant into Egypt and stayed there for some time, perhaps many years. If the visit of the Magi did, indeed, take place, it quite likely happened somewhere in Egypt (Gaza?), not Bethelem. The next time the Christ child is mentioned in biblical accounts is when he is about age 12 and he in the Great Temple in Jerusalem!

We do not know the number of the seers who undertook the journey to where the unusual traveling star seemed to lead them. We do not know how long they were on the road. It is obvious from biblical accounts that these seers did not arrive at or shortly after the birth of the Christ. It seems the child may have been more than a year old by the time the seers found him.

We know that when the seers finally arrived and found the child, the biblical account says three gifts were presented: gold, frankensense, and myhrr. It is from the "three" gifts that the western account arose that there were "three Wise Men" who visited from the east.

I received this last night from Carmen Romero. She is the "Librarian." Carmen was the right-hand person who assisted chess historian Dr. Ricardo Calvo (an IM and championship level chess player in Spain) in his research and writing for many years before his untimely death in September, 2002. After Ricardo's passing, Carmen has written many papers on the history of chess during the Medieval and early Renaissance periods that were presented at seminars and symposim around the globe. Over many years Carmen also helped me with research to provide answers to inquiries on obscure chess subjects that came to Goddesschess.

It is, perhaps, significant, that once we were informed of the illness that so quickly took the "Chief" (Ricardo) from us, Don and I planned a trip to Spain in the hopes of visiting with him and Carmen. Alas, he passed away on September 26, 2002. Earlier in the year Ricardo had told me to "come in October." And so that's how I planned out trip, never dreaming Ricardo would already be gone away from us by then. With hindsight, I now think that Ricardo had a very good idea of when he would die, because he was a medical doctor and he would have known the particulars of his illness. I think he picked a date for our visit when he knew he would already be gone and we would not see him in extremis.

I do not now remember the exact dates that Don and I traveled to Madrid -- it started during the first two weeks in October and ran into mid-month, perhaps October 10 - 16, 2002. It was a wonderful, magnificent and yet poignant journey for both of us.

We reconstituted that trip in early January this year -- short some months from a 10-year anniversary. We had another wonderful, magnificent and yet poignant journey. I blogged about our trip here extensively, journaling memories here enough to last several lifetimes.

I didn't know it then, but both Mr. Don and I would suffer through serious illnesses in the spring and long, hot summer of 2012. I thought we had both made it through the worst once autumn of 2012 arrived. I was wrong.

Don passed away unexpectedly on October 12, 2012. I could not help but note the close proximity of his death to the death of one we considered our mentor and the date we had taken that first journey to Spain some 10 years before.

It seemed to me at the time Don first met Ricardo in Hamburg in early November, 1999 that somehow, although separated by much distance and not having known each other for very long, Ricardo and Don forged a sort of golden-cord, unshakeable, unbreakable connection between them. I do not know the particulars, but I am aware that between the two of them, much intense communications took place, and Don undertook and completed a re-work of an English translation of at least one of Ricado's works that had been translated into English years before.

It is a fair statement to say that Don was never the same after Ricardo died.

And so, tonight I am sad. I cannot begin to describe how much I miss, miss, miss... But I am also happy, because I have so many incredible memories of these men who were so important in my life, in such very different ways.

I had not heard from Carmen in a long while. Perhaps she had trials and tribulations to go through, as we did, but I was thinking - the worst had happened. That Carmen had gone from us too. And so it was wonderful to hear from her so unexpectedly, and with such a beautiful content:

Thursday, December 20, 2012

NAGPUR: City's little wonder and National under-7 champion Divya Deshmukh once again made the Orange City and the country proud when she became the Asian chess champion in New Delhi on Wednesday.

With eight wins and a defeat, Divya collected eight points to conquer the 8th Asian Schools Chess Championship in under-7 girls' category that concluded at the Indira Gandhi Indoor Stadium in the Capital. In addition, she dominated the five-round blitz event to claim the second international gold.

Daughter of gynaecologists Namrata and Jitendra Deshmukh, Divya for the first time started realizing the title winning effort of any player. In her only reaction to TOI, the 1st standard student of Bhavan's Bhagwandas Purohit Vidya Mandir said, "I am very happy I won gold medals for India."

Delighted with Divya's triumph her mother Dr Namrata said, "we are very happy for our little wonder. After winning the standard event in the morning, second gold in the blitz event was icing on the cake. I was with her since the start of the tournament and as she was doing well her father also joined us. With me being alone, I need to perform the dual role of a parent as well as coach. I only told her to play her best."

She further added, "though Divya is young, she has begun understanding worth of winning. After the victory her first call was to elder sister Arya saying: I have represented India and won gold medals." After winning the national U-7 crown in July, Divya was made to work harder by her young coach Rahul Joshi for the Asian tourney where 415 players from 11 countries took part in various age categories.

The nine-round tournament organized on behalf of Asian Chess Federation by the All India Chess Federation under the aegis of FIDE was played in Swiss league pattern. With 1401 Elo points Divya started as a third seed behind state mate and top seed Bhagyashree Patil (1492) with Delhi's Jesica (1469) being the second seed.

With an easy victory over Kriti Patel, Divya, playing with the black pieces, got off to a rousing start in the first round and defeated Mirlankyzy Azaliia of Kyrgyzstan in the 9th and final round to win the coveted Asian crown for Orange City.

On her way to the gold medal winning effort, Divya defeated Shitika Raj, Chinnam Vyshnavi, A Ahalya, Bhagyashree Patil, Jesica and Sri Lanka's Gunathilake MD Wonara for the full eight points. In the 7th round, however, Divya was surprised by Gujarat's Ananya Parikh but the confidence of stunning her higher ranked rivals in the earlier rounds already gave her the crucial advantage with points.

Divya was way ahead of silver medalist Bhagyashree who had a tie at 6.5 points with Chinnam Vyshnavi of Andhra Pradesh. In the blitz event, Divya had an all win record to be on top of the table.

With the national triumph earlier this year, Divya has been already picked to represent India in the world and Asian under-8 championship in 2013. With this title she, along with the podium finishers, will represent Asia in the World Schools Chess Championship in Greece next year.

About her future, Dr Namrata said, "as first step, we just want she should perform well in world championship next year. Her coach Rahul Joshi works very hard and with full support of school authorities we managed to make her more focused. All thanks to school principal Anju Bhutani madam and Bokare sir. It becomes very difficult if schools do not encourage but they are very helpful."

On Divya's other interests, her proud mother adds, "she idolizes Viswanathan Anand and nowadays she likes Carlsen. Also she loves to dance and play like any other kid. Divya also loves to watch the movie on Bobby Fischer." Divya practices at Anand Chess Academy under Joshi. Members of the chess fraternity congratulated her for the double delight as she is the first in Vidarbha to achieve this remarkable feat in any category.

Any discussion of archaeology in the year 2012 would be incomplete without
mention of the much-talked-about end of the Maya Long Count calendar and the
apocalyptic prophecies it has engendered. With that in mind, as 2013 approaches,
the year’s biggest discovery may actually be that we’re all still here—at least
that’s what the editors of Archaeology continue to bet on.

However, you won’t find that story on our Top 10 list. We steered clear of
speculation and focused, instead, on singular finds—the stuff, if you will—the
material that comes out of the earth and changes what we thought we knew about
the past.

Here you’ll see discoveries that range from a work of Europe’s earliest wall
art to the revelation that Neanderthals, our closest relatives, selectively
picked and ate medicinal plants, and from the unexpected discovery of a 20-foot
Egyptian ceremonial boat to the excavation of stunning masks that decorate a
Maya temple and tell us of a civilization’s relation to the cosmos.

Then there are the discoveries that just made us wonder. What drove someone
to wrap their valuables in a cloth and hide them almost 2,000 years ago? And why
were people in Bronze Age Scotland gathering bones and burying them in bogs?

The finds span the last 50,000 years and cover territories from the cradle of
civilization to what is today one of the world’s most populous cities. These are
a few of the discoveries that speak to us of both our record of ingenuity and
our humanity. The enduring question is always: Were the people behind the
evidence anything like us?
—The Editors

Very interesting discovery. The well-preserved wooden timber-joined pieces were put together using tenon and joint techniques that is still in use today, with the aid of stone adzes and bone chisels -- long before the first use of metal was discovered.

Anyone writing a book about the history of carpentry may want to include these latest discoveries in the first chapter: Wooden water wells made out of oak timbers dated to over 7,000 years ago were discovered in eastern Germany, and their workmanship suggests an unexpected sophistication in carpentry skills for Neolithic farming communities of the time. The oak timbers, 151 in all, were preserved in a waterlogged environment were dated to between 5469 and 5098 BC.

"This early Neolithic craftsmanship now suggests that the first farmers were also the first carpenters", a study of the finds reports.

Moreover, they were made long before metal was discovered and used in the manufacture of tools that would have been used to fashion and construct the wells. It challenges previous assumptions that metal tools were required to create more complex wooden structures, such as these wells.

So how were they made without metal tools?

They were made by using stone adzes of at least two different sizes to produce finely cut timbers and then employing sophisticated wooden corner joining and log constructions through wedge tusk tenon joints and interlocked corner joints. Examination of tool marks also suggests the use of bone chisels in the process. Even today, certain kinds of carpentry are employed in this fashion without nails, screws and power tools, although metal tools are most often used.

According to the study report and reports of previous studies and investigations, the first Central European farmers journeyed from the Great Hungarian Plain about 7,500 years ago, leaving behind settlement structures with longhouses, pottery (called Linear Pottery Culture, or LBK) and stone tools for archaeologists to uncover through excavations in various locations across the more fertile areas of present-day Europe. Little remained of the longhouses, other than their characteristic "footprints" in the soil. But the wells, having survived nearly intact after thousands of years in their underground waterlogged environments, left a comparatively well preserved record of the technology and techniques used by the Neolithic farmers as carpenters.

Despite these finds, however, relatively little is known about these early settlers, their environment and their technology and culture. But the oak timbers analyzed in the study preserve a record, in the form of tree rings, of the environment in which they lived, holding the promise of reconstructing a picture of the world in which the early Neolithic settlers lived and what natural resources may have been at their disposal.

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"Advanced Chess" Leon 2002

About Me

I'm one of the founders of Goddesschess, which went online May 6, 1999. I earned an under-graduate degree in history and economics going to college part-time nights, weekends and summer school while working full-time, and went on to earn a post-graduate degree (J.D.) I love the challenge of research, and spend my spare time reading and writing about my favorite subjects, travelling and working in my gardens. My family and my friends are most important in my life. For the second half of my life, I'm focusing on "doable" things to help local chess initiatives, starting in my own home town. And I'm experiencing a sort of personal "Renaissance" that is leaving me rather breathless...